Teaching

How Can Teacher Preparation Stay Relevant?

Eleonora Villegas-Reimers and Meagan Comb explore the ways programs are adapting to today’s challenges

Traditional teacher preparation programs housed in institutions of higher education are finding themselves having to adapt to the new reality that fewer people are studying to become teachers. As a result, these programs are building new partnerships, changing their curriculum, and adopting new recruitment methods to keep themselves relevant.

For this Conversations with the Dean session, Dean David Chard is joined by Meagan Comb, assistant dean of Executive Affairs and executive director of the Wheelock Educational Policy Center, and clinical professor Eleonora Villegas-Reimers, chair of the Teaching & Learning Department, to discuss the role that traditional teacher preparation plays in a continually changing landscape—and how higher education institutions can improve their methods to encourage a new generation of students to join the profession.

Highlights from the Conversation

The changing landscape of teacher prep

There’s been a significant decline in teacher prep enrollment over the last decade. . . . It used to be that, in most states, to become a teacher, you had to complete a teacher prep program from an institution of higher education. [But because of the] shortages, alongside concerns and questions about the quality of training meeting the needs of the current classroom environment, new avenues began to open up.

Meagan Comb

Keys to teacher retention

It’s fascinating to have conversations both with recent graduates who are choosing to stay, but also with teachers who have been in the field for 20, 25 years and are choosing to still stay. In talking with the younger teachers, how well prepared they feel has an impact on their decision to stay. They feel that they know what they are doing. They feel that they can do things even when they don’t feel totally supported by their administration, their district, or by the parents in their school.

Eleonora Villegas-Reimers

The impact of contemporary research

When I became a teacher, we didn’t know about the impact of social and emotional learning. We didn’t know how the brain works to facilitate learning, and the conditions that we need to create so that learning can happen. . . . So now we have research that says, “You have an ethical responsibility to change the way you prepare teachers to respond to what we know about the way we can facilitate learning and teaching.”

Eleonora Villegas-Reimers

Conversations with the Dean are a series of webinars hosted by Dean Chard that explore some of the most pressing topics in education. Learn more about Conversations with the Dean.